Cut
by Meixia
Summary: Clex, written for the Cure Song Title Challenge - 'I wish you felt the way that I still do.'


Cut  
  
Completed 4/18/03  
  
"I wish you felt the way that I still do." You said and the gloom of Sunday's rain and fog fell around your shoulders. I felt like you were a stranger. The words that came out of your mouth were so foreign to my ears, it sounded like a dead language.  
  
I wanted to rip out your feelings and see how you felt afterwards. Maybe then you could feel the pain through your indestructible skin, pain that had accumulated over the years and ran like solid lines of fire in my veins, fueling a machine. I was not that different from you then.  
  
"I don't feel anything but pity for the fool who believes you are the answer to the worlds' troubles." I said and pulled my skin tighter around my bones, the harder for you to get at them. You've always known where to strike in the past, when you had a mouth so sweetly telling lies. I had felt enough for you to let them slip by.  
  
You shrugged in a way that reminded me of Clark, the red and blue suit falling away in layers in the light drizzle, and I clenched my fists to counterattack.  
  
"I could throw you off this building." You said.  
  
"I could probably survive it." I said. From ten floors up, it wasn't that much of a stretch.  
  
"If you were to fall." You smiled, and yet it was somehow expressionless, empty, the kind reserved for indulging foolish children. "But if I threw you down.."  
  
I knew you wouldn't. "I thought you had feelings for me."  
  
"Clark does."  
  
"He did." And it hurt to know that that was truth. Possibly the only one that ever mattered, but that is something I will never know.  
  
"Don't say that," you said and stepped forward as the wet wind blew back your cape, pushing you further away the closer you got. "It's like listening to a breaking heart."  
  
I smiled and tapped my chest. "It already is."  
  
Your eyes pleaded with me. "We can still do this, Lex."  
  
For a moment I swayed, unsure. It only took another moment for me to regain the practical sense of self -perservence.  
  
I shook my head. You were so determined it was actually comical. I would never fall for your tricks anymore, betrayed too many times by your mouth. I would never again be the Big Bad Wolf fooled by innocence, because you didn't have that anymore to use against me. It felt good to be finally standing on equal ground.  
  
"You don't understand." The exasperation and conviction in your voice was genuine, though I doubted if it came down to upholding the world or me achieving an understanding of your myriad of emotions that it would be me you would've chosen to appease. "When I'm with you I feel hopeless hands helplessly pulling you back close to me."  
  
"You must be feeling ghosts." Slipped my hand into my pocket to keep it from grabbing yours. I would not shake.  
  
Moments passed, and you stood with all the glory of a fallen soldier, defeated, but not broken. The rain started pouring faster, pounding harder into the rooftop.  
  
Time felt like hours until the water had finally seeped into my skin.  
  
"I should go." I took a step back, and like the sun pulling in the Earth, you took a step forward.  
  
I would not shake. The cold wetness was a good distraction.  
  
"I wish you felt the way that I still do, but you don't. You don't feel anymore."  
  
I raised my artificial hand, and touched it to the back of your palm as it dangled by your side. "I don't." And it was truth. These were my war- wounds, this was my cold heart, and these were my days after Clark Kent had gone MIA, when Superman had risen from his ashes.  
  
You took a startled but steady step back, our orbit broken like the snap of a spiders webbing, and I was propelled in the opposite direction, the wind pulling me back to the door leading to the stairwell leading down to the lobby and out through the revolving doors. I could practically see my Mercedes waiting in the parking lot.  
  
Your mouth became a thin line, cold and impersonal, and your eyes were dead cold with a sudden flip of a switch. I was able to do the exact same thing; I just had no need to anymore.  
  
Somehow you managed to have the parting word.  
  
"That's too bad." You said, and before I could agree in bitter resentment, you were gone in a flurry of red and blue, down into the city below, faded by the rain from above.  
  
Somehow the moon hung higher that night; I watched it from the rooftop until my clothes completely dried, and with the water evaporated my guilt. Sometimes good needed an evil in order to exist, and sometimes love needed to be unrequited in order to strive.  
  
I remembered there was the deal with GlobalTech to be signed still, and a meeting to attend in Sydney the next day.  
  
But I walked away knowing I had done the right thing. 


End file.
